There's a New Firefox Beta In Town – And It Starts Up Faster Than Ever Before

Firefox 4 is running behind schedule, but today, Mozilla released the 9th beta version of its popular browser. This new version is mainly focused on improving speed and only features small interface enhancements. Thanks to a plethora of changes under the hood, Firefox now also starts significantly faster and complex animations will be smoother. Mozilla also notes that it has improved the bookmarks and history code, which should make bookmarking faster as well.

This new beta doesn’t include too many cosmetic changes, but Windows users will notice that their tabs have been raised to the top of the window and are now level with the Firefox menu button.

Firefox Sync, Panorama (which I personally never use, to be honest) and App Tabs are obviously also included in this new beta and the new add-on manager Mozilla introduced in the last beta has received some much-needed UI polish.

Given the current discussion about Google’s decision to drop support for H.264, it is also worth noting that this beta (just like others before it) supports WebM natively.